He’s also not looking at me anymore, so I don’t think he sees me nod my agreement. “Housemates. Totally normal. Accidental housemates.”
He lifts his gaze to me. “I can’t take you to the movies tomorrow.”
That shouldn’t hurt as bad as it does. The way I would kill for a glass of wine right now to drown this day in… “But we can still be friends.”
“Hard not to be.”
“Agreed.” I rise before this gets worse or before he changes his mind. “I’ll go start on dinner. And a menu for next week.”
“Ziggy?”
“Hmm?”
“This team is the only family I have left.”
How is it possible that I’ve never hugged this man?
And now that I can’t, it’s all I want to do.
Well, notall.
But definitely my highest priority at the moment. “I won’t let him take that from you. Promise.”
He studies me like he’s looking for the cracks in my statement, then nods. “Thank you.”
Talk about the weight of the world.
The trade-off for getting to stay here, to pretend everything’s normal here, is that I’m now carrying the weight ofhisworld.
Funny thing though—I don’t mind.
Not a bit.
22
Holt
Ziggy didn’t yell.
I was positive she’d yell, but she didn’t.
Instead, she melted in front of my eyes, all because of the goofball sign that I said I needed to make but didn’t think my friends would take me seriously about.
How the fuck am I going to live with a woman in my house who gets more irresistible by the minute when she’s completely and irrevocably off-limits?
Especially when I know she feels this thing between us too?
I liked you.
She said it like she doesn’t anymore, as if she could just turn off liking someone because she found out it was a bad idea, but if she didn’t like me anymore, she wouldn’t have been so upset.
Fuck, this is hard.
Dinner is awkward. She takes hers onto the porch and turns on one of her language podcasts while I sit in the kitchen.
I skip sitting with her to watch TV because I say I need to get a little extra rest.
Not that I want to be in my room.
